ART: PEGGY GUGGENHEIM EXHIBITION

By VIVIEN RAYNOR

Published: April 17, 1987

YOGI BERRA once said, ''It ain't over till it's over,'' and every year, regular as the output of a lithium battery, the World Series proves him right. The corollary to this is that when it's over it's over, and its proof is ''Peggy Guggenheim's Other Legacy.''

The show, numbering 57 objects, occupies the upper tiers of the Guggenheim Museum, courtesy of the Bankers Trust Company Group. Most of the works were produced during the 1940's and - acquired by the collector during the same period - were exhibited in her New York gallery, Art of This Century. All scandals that time and art history have made respectable, they hardly constitute a legacy, much less compare with the work installed in the Venetian palace to which the collector retired after closing her gallery in 1947. Evidently, none of the 38 items contributed by museums were bequeathed to them by Miss Guggenheim herself, although 23 are gifts that she presented while alive.

Some of these stand on their own as fine specimens, among them the 1929 abstraction by Theo van Doesburg, which includes one of the diagonal forms that severed his relationship with Mondrian. But though they include several Jackson Pollocks, notably his large ''Mural'' of 1943, the gifts are more interesting as examples of the collector's prescience than of her taste.

William Baziotes, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko are the other American pioneers on hand, but none do their patron more credit than the young Richard Pousette-Dart, whose five canvases are precocious in their maturity. The four nearly monochromatic images suggesting a fetishistic kind of heraldry are the best - and very large. Mr. Pousette-Dart may have blazed the bigness trail.

The works representing the key Surrealists, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Andre Masson and Matta, are on the whole pretty tame, and there is only a small blue glass centaur with yellow hair, beard and horns to speak for Picasso. Pietro Consagra, Claire Falkenstein, Otto Freundlich, David Hare and Laurence Vail are other familiar names. Nevertheless, the show's collective impact equals that of a flower found pressed between the pages of an old book. Obviously, this is largely a matter of the Americans being themselves works-in-progress at the time. But something is missing -perhaps it's the mixture of seediness and rowdiness that was the avant-garde of that time.

Even so, the show works better as a portrait of the collector. Peggy Guggenheim was no run-of-the-mill patron. The rebelliousness that would probably have landed a poor woman in jail was, for the niece of the wealthy Solomon Guggenheim, a source of energy. She may not have precipitated the American art revolution, but she was one of its most important catalysts, if only as an importer of Surrealism - and its major exponent, Max Ernst. As an expatriate bent on modernizing, or stirring up, the stodginess she found upon returning home from World War II, she was willful and perverse enough to qualify as a Surrealist herself. On the other hand, the speed with which she abandoned ship to go back to Italy smacks a little of dilettantism.

This had to do with a loss of spiritual traction and the beginning of a certain disenchantment, or so says Fred Licht, who is the curator of her collection and one of the show's organizers. Writing in the catalogue, Mr. Licht notes that in later life the collector felt she ''had won her battle rather too thoroughly'' so that ''art was now in danger of being loved to death,'' especially in her native country. Since Miss Guggenheim died in 1979, she would not have known that the worst was yet to come.

Maybe it's the contemporary context that makes her art seem so innocuous. Anyway, thanks to the efforts of Mr. Licht and his colleagues, Melvin P. Lader, associate professor of art history at George Washington University, and Susan B. Hirschfeld, assistant curator at the Guggenheim, the show seems to insist that the revolution isn't dead, that it has just passed into art history, which may be the same thing. Though most viewers won't see it, the final test of the exhibition's quality will come after it closes, on May 3, and travels to Venice, where it will set up shop, so to speak, in the same setting as Miss Guggenheim's real bequest. Also of interest this week: Abe Ajay (Sid Deutsch Gallery, 20 West 57th Street): Once again, Abe Ajay seems to be chafing against his own perfectionism. Each of these 16 reliefs comes on as a model of precision and each contains a demur. Sometimes it is incidental, as in the clusters of white polyester resin forms nestling so seductively in their stern Constructivist nests made of wood. Most are themselves geometrical, but a few are rippling, amoeba-like exceptions. At other times, the contradictions insinuate themselves throughout the composition: for example, the flashes of turquoise, mustard and orange that light up the monastically brown reliefs, and the cages of soldered wires protecting them.

But in the case of the works deriving from the artist's earlier ''Portal'' series, the demur is the thing. It's represented primarily by beautiful tinted engravings of constellations and the personae symbolizing them. Accompanied by vertical arrangements of the white castings, they occupy the openings and should harmonize with them. That they don't is because of the expressionistically impastoed surfaces of the frames surrounding the holes and because their brownish-yellow color is such a poke in the eye. Though this is the one sign of stress in an otherwise smooth performance, it hints that this accomplished reconciler of opposites may soon have to choose between them. (Through Wednesday.) James Van Der Zee (Sharpe Gallery, 175 Avenue B, at 11th Street; Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers): James Van Der Zee died in 1983, three years short of his centenary. He was 14 years old when he took his first picture, 28 when he got his first photographic job and 29 when he opened his first studio in Harlem. It was a career with two heydays. The first began in the 1920's, when he became an immensely popular portraitist with sidelines that included genre scenes, funeral shots and exquisitely complex allegories. It lasted until public taste changed, after World War II. The second heyday began with Van Der Zee's appearance as the largest contributor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's ''Harlem on My Mind'' show of 1969. And it has continued unabated in the form of monographs and magazine articles about the artist as well as exhibitions of the pictures that he spoke of ''making'' rather than ''taking.''